What is On Page SEO? |

OnPage Guidelines

What is On-Page SEO?

by Robert Hughey (Google+)

What is SEO?

On-Page SEO Best Practices

Title Tags

• TITLE.  Each page of your website should have its own title, and make sure to place the title of each page between the page's title tags in the code. The title tag should be no more than 70 characters in length, including spaces.

• META TAGS.  Different search engines use different META tags to different degrees, but there are some universals between them all. It's a "SEO Best Practice" to have META data on the following on each page of your website.
• Description - 30 words or less
• Keywords - 10 is your maximum

• IMAGE ALT TAGS.  For every image on your website or webpage, there should be alternative text accompanying it. The alt text describes the photo or image as if to a seeing impaired person. Most webpage editing programs easily allow the editing of image alt text, but if you want to go right to root of the issue, let's make some small additions in the code of your site.

 Each image is first "sourced" with: src=" URL pointing to image's location". Immediately after, insert one space, then type alt=" Your Alt Text Goes Here ".

Now, rather than just stuffing keywords relative to your page in to the alt text, consider being very specific in describing the picture. Here is an excellent place to use synonyms or related terminology to the keywords you've listed in your meta tags.

On-Page SEO - LINKS!

Simple On the Page Modifications - Links

•  LINK TITLES - like the alternative text for your images, each url on your site (whether internally linking or linking out of the site) should have a descriptive title. Simply include within the code: title="Title of the Link Goes Here" 
  As before, avoid simply stuffing in keywords, but you're encouraged to use synonyms or related terms to describe what the url connects.

• INTERNAL LINKS: The way you link to the pages of your site from within your site. I recommend using a header than has various pages listed and using "breadcrumbs," which are standards for WordPress, Blogger and almost all template based websites.

• LINKS OUT.  The links you point out of your site play heavily in on-page SEO. When you recognize other sources (even your most cutthroat competition) as authorities and references, the Search Engines reward you for doing so. Coding wise, it's always a good practice to label links that point out of your site or page. How? I recommend the following:
  
  
  Elemental Microformat in HTML
  rel="YourRelationshipToWhereLinkPoints" Here there are two main choices. Either label it as rel="external" or rel="nofollow" 
  What "nofollow" will do is instruct search engine crawler programs to not follow the link and index the link between your web property and whatever you're linking. Or put another way, it's a way of saying "Don't count the site at the end of this link for or against my site."
  Another great relationship link is the rel="me" tag - which is where you can inform the search engines that the page linked here is also your property. 

Some Additional Resources:

An excellent page you should be using daily on your webmaster jouney: Google Webmaster Tools, which you should certainly use given that its both powerful and FREE.

Check Out Google's Starter Guide for SEO.

Not to be outdone, I'm personally in love with the slightly different (and in many ways more diverse) Bing Webmaster Tools.

On-the-Page Essential: The most important goal when optimizing your page or website is to make sure that you create the best quality content you can possibly produce. Sure, you have to check your code for the basic labels and meta data, but other than that the Search Engines are going to reward the best content over any fly-by-night SEO scheme.